I am quite interested in the science of doing history and it strikes me that research would have been so much easier today if past generations had thought a little harder about preserving their culture and activities. Which got me thinking about what people maybe 10,000 years from now might (assuming there is no direct link between today and 10,000 in the future) have wished we could have done more of today. I am conscious that a lot of who we are is being recorded digitally, so the future guys will have no stone tablets that might endure extreme weather, etc.

Archaeology generally labors under the shadow of being a destructive science. One of the first things an archaeologist is taught is that for every given area that we dig, a team digging in fifty years would be able to do it better, but can't because we already dug it. The broad field of archaeobiology is the most obvious example of this, as technological progress continually makes its methods cheaper, more effective, and more accessible. If I had to guess, a person in fifty years reading a report published now will wish there was more rigorous soil sampling for botanical remains, and possible a greater attention played to small animals bones, such as rodents (especially) and fish. These are issues that archaeologists are well aware of, but still difficult to reconcile with the need to be somewhat timely in excavation.

More broadly, I think the entire model of archaeological excavation is unsustainable, particularly when you take your eyes away from western Europe. There is an enormous attrition in archaeological remains in China, Turkey, eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, and almost certainly other areas I am less familiar with. These areas can't get the attention they need because of a general lack of money, and so sites are lost forever. The lack of funds also has more individual implications, and the financial barrier to entry for students is not getting smaller. For the majority of digs, a student actually needs to pay to do frequently backbreaking and tedious labor, often in distinctly unglamorous areas of the world, while their friends take paid summer internships in New York, London and Chicago.

I honestly considered going into archaeology as a field after taking a class. However when I searched for graduate schools most seemed interested in Isreal/Greek. I was more interested in Russian/Siberia and Alaska.

Could you see, then, future archaeologists having a more rounded understanding of the ancient near east and a less first-world-centric view as a result of better digging capabilities and opportunities outside the "classical" areas?

I don't think that is quite the issue. I mean, the reason the Near East isn't better understood archaeologically is certainly not from a lack of interest, it is because of politics. But that is really only a lead up the real issue, which is not that most scholars are Eurocentric, but that most scholars are European. Why is Britain arguably still the best understood Roman province? Because Britain has a ton of archaeologists. Why is the German neolithic better known than the Armenian Neolithic? Because there are more archaeologists from Germany than from Armenia. Unless nationalism entirely stops being a thing, people from a given region deciding they want to be an archaeologist will always be more important than people from Europe deciding they want to dig there. I believe, hope really, that is all a part of economic development.

I had never realized this about archaeology before I dug at Megiddo last summer. It's pretty astonishing how careless archaeologists were in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Schliemann destroyed most of what is probably Troy in his eagerness to get to his vision of Troy. Evans took pretty large liberties in recreating the palace at Knossos, and may have irreparably influenced how we view the Minoans.

At Megiddo, the Chicago Expedition to Megiddo of the '20s and '30s started out their excavation by removing entire layers of the tel at a time, before they realize it was too expensive as just dug a massive trench down to bedrock. Nowadays, Megiddo is excavated in four relatively small areas, with the intent to preserve the majority of the hill for future archaeologists.

I object to lumping Evans and the OI Megiddo dig with Schliemann. Evans and the OI, as flawed as their methodology may be today, were at least in keeping with their times and can't fairly be criticized--both were before Wheeler, after all. Schliemann had worked with Giuseppe Fiorelli (famous for the Pompeii casts) and still used dynamite.

Apologies, I didn't mean to compare Evans with Schliemann -- Schliemann was in a league of his own, by a long shot. I was just highlighting some of the older, more questionable methods that some of the early guys used.

Update media to new formats as they arrive. We have the technology, and even usually the labour and will (yay postgrad slaves). The biggest hurdle is access and copyright - without a licence, even accredited historians can't make a copy of a film or phonograph record. And with little financial incentive pushing the owners themselves to keep and update their works, tens of thousands of irreplaceable pieces of media are being lost. Try to find any obscure silent-era film or early television broadcast and you're reliant upon luck - whether someone stumbles across a copy in their attic or a garage sale.

We have the technology, and even usually the labour and will (yay postgrad slaves). The biggest hurdle is access and copyright - without a licence, even accredited historians can't make a copy of a film or phonograph record.

This is a very first-world-centric way of looking at things.

Those of us working in Africa, or parts of Asia and Latin America, do not have these same issues necessarily. For example, the technology is not accessible (and sometimes neither are the records) in parts of SA where I work, and departmental budgets are stretched so tight that there is no money to do it. Until I digitized certain records myself, and compiled some figures, then gave copies over, there was no money to do it. They had the will, but neither funds or enough people with expertise. In other countries, even the political (usually) or cultural will is wanting. Colonial heritage is not something a lot of people want to exert great efforts to save, unless you can make the case that doing so preserves something even more important. We work very hard to satisfy that latter justification but it's difficult, even when my colleagues making the case are from the country in question and have a very intimate grasp of the forces in play.

On the other hand, most of these same institutions are not locked into the copyright-clutching model of record reproduction. I sent a request to a deputy minister about publishing certain photographs in a book and he said "sounds good, just credit us and indicate that copyright remains with us, thanks for asking." That's it.

So new media formats don't arrive everywhere at once. What good is a massive digitization project in a country where nobody's got the gear or resources to make it accessible? This is a big problem, and one that future historians may ding archivists for--the unevenness of this entire transition. (They'll also ding us for our spotty and nonsensical ways of preserving electronic records, but that's an animal for the 20-year-rule mostly.)

Thanks, that was really great. This is really a huge issue that is greatly understudied, and unfortunately, quite misunderstood by older generations of historians, archivists and bureaucrats. :(

The issue is also how new search technologies again widen the gap between the amount of material published about First World history and the rest. It is so much easier to do research and search for things on newspapers that have been digitized than it is on paper that falls apart in your hands and (if you are fortunate) microfilm.

You'd find the BBC Storyville documentary Google and the World Brain of interest, there's a tension between the devil and the deep blue sea in the issue of digitization and archival/access storage of information. I've been involved with the digitization and tagging of several hundred thousand of documents per annum from several different spheres of modern history over the past three decades and that work has largely gone unnoticed behind a paywall club. It's an issue that disturbs original founders and one that can yet rear it's head in corporations like google.

I disagree with that, but my studies also focused on Middle English/Early Modern English, where the difference between 10 manuscript copies and 100 is huge and the scraps of paper, letters, and margin notations are often as interesting and informative as the actual plays/poems/etc. themselves are. In essence, someone like me is going to be looking at the original document titles and subfolders too.

Just in 2011 we had the .ee domain reform. Prior to that, .ee domains had been free for everyone for essentially forever for 20 years since the creation of the .ee domain space. (There were restrictions, but let's not focus on those.)

With the reform all .ee domains had to be renewed every year for a fairly hefty sum of money. As a result more than 40,000 domains went dark overnight. Largely websites that people had built since 1991. Looking at the Google results for the query "site:ee" before and after the reform, we estimated that up to 800 million individual pages had suddenly been wiped from the internet.

Since we were fighting against the domain reform (for various reasons), we approached the national archives on whether they would be interested in funding a tiny project to scrape a portion of these early websites and store them on cheap hard drives. They were not.

If any future historian wants to find out what happened on Estonian websites before the domain reform of 2011, their only source will likely be the Internet Wayback Machine.

When you say "assuming there is no direct link" do you mean a gap in civilization from a war or catastrophe (e.g. flu epidemic)?

If you do the thought experiment that digital archiving becomes an essential part of historians work in the coming decades and centuries, at some point one would hope disaster planning would be considered. Say the digital surveillance records being made by spy agencies today get published after 50 or 100 years and revolutionize historians understanding of the Arab spring, Afghanistan etc. (imagine a historian in 2100 getting access to every .gov email or document or embassy cable from 2000-2010.) Whenever that point is reached, one would hope a digital equivalent of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (capable of bridging a ~1,000 year gap) would get funded and maintained.

I'm not a historian, but all these answers are very thorough and interesting and they got me thinking about an issue that I have previously readt about : the reading of digital archives.

It is uncertain for how long in the future the current formats used to store information will still be used. Thus it becomes important to preserve not only the source materials, but also the reading devices (e.g. floppy drives). Unlike stone carvings, it would not be immediately obvious to future historians how to read a lot of our current digital documents, especially if some calamity were to occur and cut off technological knowledge.

One of the claims I've seen is that digital copies of things won't last as long as hard copies. The vast majority of pictures taken today never get printed. They're put on hard drives, thumb drives and the like and then eventually get deleted or lost when the drive corrupts.

Another one is compare the investigations of the S&L crisis of the 1980s to those concerning the Wall Street meltdown of recent years. We have much less data about the Wall Street/mortgage event than we had about the S&L one. I doubt historians of the future will be happy about that.

One could reasonably assert - as I would - that historians of today are morally obligated to research/investigate current affairs within their area of expertise because they will be able to see things in the data that will help historians in the future.